Started to play with ProRender and of course started with the more render intensive scenes. I was really impressed with how much more quickly it was able to generate a preview render in the viewport. Even if this is not going to be your final render of choice, it plays a huge role with being able to do interactive render tests with lighting and textures.

The only confusing thing is that while PR uses GI and the feature list on PR has emissive textures (if I remember that list correctly), the illuminate settings on a material are all greyed out. Is this feature not implemented yet or am I missing something?

If it's grayed out with prorender it probably does not work yet. I also noticed Absoption is grayed out, some procedurals don't work, there can be a compiling time even after the first very long one, there is no way to turn off caustics which can lead to caustic speckles from not having enough samples in the caustics, it is slow as mud sometimes being 74x slower than Redshift, and a few other things I don't remember at this moment. The way it is now I will never use it.

On the plus side R19 has a viewport is very nice. I don't have to render till the very end. Using material exchanger function helps a lot when using 3rd party render engines.

The only confusing thing is that while PR uses GI and the feature list on PR has emissive textures (if I remember that list correctly), the illuminate settings on a material are all greyed out. Is this feature not implemented yet or am I missing something?

The settings in the Illuminate tab allow you to tune or bias the GI - they allow you to crank up the Illumination unnaturally or bias the the GI samples towards a portal. ProRender is a physically-based unbiased render, so it doesn't have any use for these settings. It natively renders GI, but you can't tweak it in the same way as our classic hybrid GI implementation.

The settings in the Illuminate tab allow you to tune or bias the GI - they allow you to crank up the Illumination unnaturally or bias the the GI samples towards a portal. ProRender is a physically-based unbiased render, so it doesn't have any use for these settings. It natively renders GI, but you can't tweak it in the same way as our classic hybrid GI implementation.

Rick,

Thank you... That just makes perfect sense but it does beg a follow on question in terms of how do you increase the emmissive capability of a material? Look at the attached image rendered in R18 using GI. The model comes from Steffen Morrell (Stonemason in the forums) who sells his models in the Daz3D marketplace (for an incredibly cheap price -- this whole model was only around $30). This one is Urban Future 5. I love to convert them to C4D and then use them as a mechanism to challenge my texture/lighting skills (see the thread "Is this cheating" for another example):

There is just no way to get as good a result for the lighting from that neon-like awning on the right than to use GI and cranking up the illumination to 4500%. It really has that garish over-bright glare that you would expect in a cheap part of the town. You can also see a bit on the red neon tubes and glow from the neon sign in the upper left. I tried it with area lights, etc. but it just did not look as good (and took a bit more tweaking as it created fireflys should you combine those area lights with GI).

So how would you achieve this same affect of a bright emmissive material with an un-biased renderer?

Dave

P.S. Hearing great things about your Siggraph presentation on R19, but I have yet to get to it. If the answer is at Cinversity, just point me to it!!!

In R19 FBX importing and exporting is working wayyyyyyy better now. Not only do the models export correct with the right axis, but the C4D materials also export now. It's a dream come true. To anyone working at MAXON a huge thank you for getting this working! The time and headaches saved with this is huge. For me this is worth the upgrade price right there.

Indeed its the smaller things that become the big game changers, and the Alembic Morph is one such feature. Iv been looking to get a better workflow with Marvellous Designer, and thanks to the Alembic Morph I can easily get animation from MD into C4D while keeping the mesh as a editable mesh. Whats more it opens up the ability to bake down to Motion Clips without first baking down pla data. Here is a quick video I did to show this. This file format also allows you to change the frame rate, and I seem to have no issues with penetrating cloth. Early days in my tests, but so far so good. Only down side to alembic is file size and time to export from MD.

In R19 FBX importing and exporting is working wayyyyyyy better now. Not only do the models export correct with the right axis, but the C4D materials also export now. It's a dream come true. To anyone working at MAXON a huge thank you for getting this working! The time and headaches saved with this is huge. For me this is worth the upgrade price right there.

This sounds interesting. I did some FBX imports in the past and they worked quite well, but sometimes there were issues. Is there a list somewhere about the improvements of the FBX import?

This sounds interesting. I did some FBX imports in the past and they worked quite well, but sometimes there were issues. Is there a list somewhere about the improvements of the FBX import?

In regards to FBX export all seems good. It puts the cache mc file into a folder, Marvellous Designer needs this file in the root directory to read it. This lets you bypass the old way having to export a Obj, and MDD file to get your character/Avatar into MD. Using Steady bake plugin lets you bake down animations to pla while baking down what ever level of Subd smoothing, this is essential for MD.

Big down side so far is it seems FBX from MD while making a mc cache file C4D cant read it, hence why alembic is my next line of choice.

LOD Name Suffix

If this option is enabled, the objects under the LOD object will be given the suffix _LODx, whereby the x represents a consecutive number. Unity 3D, for example, requires this naming convention.

Note that FBX only supports the LOD ModeChildren, whereby H/V Screen Size and Screen Surface is output as a percent value, which can, for example, be read by Maya.

From the help system within C4D.

RELEASE 19

Textures and Materials

Here you can define if materials, including material channels and their textures should be included in the FBX file. A list of material channels and properties supported by FBX can be found here. Shaders are not yet supported.

As Text File

If enabled, the FBX file will be saved in ASCII text format. This makes it easier, for example, for game developers to import animations into game engines.

Selection Only

If this option is enabled, only the selected objects, including their Child objects will be exported.

Global Coordinates

Selected objects will be saved with global coordinates (instead of with local coordinates or the Parent object, as is usually the case with objects in hierarchies.

Embed Textures

If enabled, textures will be imbedded into the FBX file. If disabled, an absolute path to the texture will be saved. This will, of course, make the file smaller but the texture will no longer be found if the FBX file is moved to another computer or directory.

I've just been watching the C4Dlive stream, and have just heard for the very first time, from anywhere, including this thread (!) that R19 includes an <50% speed increase for Standard Render, most effective on scenes with lots of reflection, transparency and refraction. It is literally double the speed it used to be, and nobody has mentioned it ! I still use SR for hair, and in a few other circumstances too, so this is excellent news in my book, and I just thought I should shout about it here a little bit in case anyone else had missed that.